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open-sourcegisgeographyontology

Geographical ontologies ready to use?

I'm looking for an ontology containing geographical knowledge. In particular I'd like to have these types of information:

  • political states / regions / cities / city areas
  • geographical regions (e.g. continents, name of mountains, lakes, etc)

For example, starting from the node "New York" I'd like to be able to find parents like the New York state, the USA etc, and children like Manhattan, Bronx, etc. I couldn't find anything open-source/free to use. I know that a lot of researchers extract such information from Wikipedia, but I couldn't find any off-the-shelf packages to use. I also checked OpenStreetMap, which is great for the amount of data but doesn't seem to contain a proper geographical ontology.

Even a web service would be good!

Any hints? Mulone

Solution

  • geonames maintains a large hierarchical feature list which has a corresponding ontology. rdf, web services, etc... It has all the sorts of things that you list wanting and more.